It’s in me alone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly, sourly, along separate sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self. I also blend John and Trudy in my daydreams – like every child of estranged parents, I long to remarry them, this base pair, and so unite my circumstances to my genome.
From where I am, you and my mother and the world are all one. Hyperbole, I know. The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I’m saying is, I’m fearful of rejection.
Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight- this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist- a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term.
My pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven’t seen described.
In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.
God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit?
All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?
It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get.
A man newly in love knows what life is.
Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means.
I’m close to my mother’s heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband’s voice, and there’s an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I’d say it’s a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth.
She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.
There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam’s apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop.
Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.
Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies.
She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?
The quiet gravity really wasn’t his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.
I experienced only the glow of an extraordinary reading experience, a form of profound gratitude familiar to all who love literature.
Memory’s got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.